Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 2, 2010
Many of us have the ability to change the trajectory of other people’s lives. Sometimes we don’t even realize it. This is a story of one person who had the power to change my life – and did so. It’s the story of persistence in entrepreneurs. And it’s the story of “paying it forward.&#. The person who changed my life was Cory Van Wolvelaere , who passed away two years ago this week after a long battle with cancer.
Steve Blank
DECEMBER 13, 2010
Teaching in Chile. I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program. Valaparaiso houses. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what I call “Chilecon Valley” is being talked about continually here. In my next post I’ll share a longer description of my impressions.
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Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 15, 2010
When someone introduces me to an “idea person,” I automatically jump to the down-side conclusion that this person doesn’t do follow-up. Of course there are people who are great at getting things done, but haven’t had an original idea in their life. Great entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, are great at both. I was with IBM in the early PC days when Bill worked with us to provide PC DOS and other software.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 19, 2010
As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.&# As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.&# Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?&#. This is a not a new question. I’ve been thinking about this since I first started writing code (APL) when I was 12 (ahem – 33 years ago) on a computer in the basement of a Frito-Lay data center in Dallas.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 19, 2010
Ideally, you'll find some time over the next few weeks to curl up with a good story. Or hey, at least that's what I look forward to on vacation. If you are looking for some books on entrepreneurship to read, or even to gift, here are some recommended books from 2010. There were a number of great business books published this year, many of which we reviewed here as part of ReadWriteWeb's " Weekend Reading " series.
This is going to be BIG.
DECEMBER 10, 2010
I just had the pleasure of sitting in on a SinglePlatform team development session—where everyone in the company (they have about a dozen people at the moment) sat down to work through personal styles of work and communication. They sat around a table talking personality types, how they prefer to interact with others, etc. Everyone was having fun because it was clear that they were all working towards making a better and more successful working environment.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
crowdSPRING Blog
DECEMBER 15, 2010
Small businesses and startups face many challenges when marketing their products and services. Small businesses and startups have minimal brand recognition, are often located in geographic or demographic areas that limit their marketing options, and most have small (or non-existent) marketing budgets. Some marketers advise small businesses and startups to research and create strategic marketing plans.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 1, 2010
It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. More executives, or other more creative titles are seen as a big red flag.
David Teten
DECEMBER 8, 2010
Expert networks have been in the news a lot for the past few weeks, due to the SEC’s attempt to look for insider trading amongst hedge funds, following on their Galleon investigation (Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon is in the photo shown). The best source of information on this topic is as usual the Integrity Research blog. I wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of their commentary: expert networks replace social capital with financial capital.
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 2, 2010
During this week's roundtable, one of the questions that I answered was about the One Million by One Million program's plans around supporting social enterprises. Well, 1M/1M is focused on helping businesses generate $1M in annual revenue, whatever be the nature of the business. We see a lot of businesses that can be characterized as social enterprises, ranging from education to rural development businesses.
Startup Lessons Learned
DECEMBER 31, 2010
Thank you, 2010. I'm excited for 2011, and I want to share some of my plans for the coming year. But before I do, I also feel obligated to take a look back on my plans for last year. I can't believe a whole year has passed since I wrote a blog post called " Towards a new entrepreneurship " laying out my priorities for 2010. Back then, I wrote: "[Here is] an idea that I don't think is too widespread yet: that entrepreneurship is an industry.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 13, 2010
One of the wisest people I worked with in my career was Ameet Shah. Ameet always had the quietly reflective view of “why things were&# that always came from a unique angle that I hadn’t considered. He taught me, amongst other things, the benefit of “ top down thinking &# that changed the way I analyzed markets, companies and people.
crowdSPRING Blog
DECEMBER 9, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 29, 2010
It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup. A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 24, 2010
If you are reading this on my website you’ll see a new bar popup at the bottom of your browser. It’s the BigDoor MiniBar. If you are a regular reader of Feld Thoughts, check in and join the community. We invested in BigDoor earlier this year as part of our Distribution theme. BigDoor’s goal is to “gamify&# any website. They’ve built a very deep and rich set of functionality around game mechanics via a programmable API – things like checkins, points, badges
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 29, 2010
During the holidays, the Web becomes an even more significant part of our lives, connecting us to our relatives and friends around the world. The Internet might be truly global then, but the world of startups still revolves much around Silicon Valley. Together with 40 Nordic entrepreneurs , we decided to take a trip to the startup mecca, looking for opportunities and lessons to learn.
This is going to be BIG.
DECEMBER 17, 2010
This was the first time I had ever heard about del.icio.us (I still like to use the old naming convention)… note the date. This was about three months before Union Square Ventures closed an investment in the company—and a month before I actually joined them fulltime. As I look at my e-mail archive, I had already started to do some project work before my start date, looking into companies, doing some competitive analysis.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 5, 2010
This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version is the shorter, ADHD version. If you came here via a direct link you might want to check out the more detailed full version on my blog, which is here. Social Networks: Past, Present & Future. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).
crowdSPRING Blog
DECEMBER 22, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 11, 2010
By Francine Hardaway, Ph.D. Taking other people’s money to fund your startup changes your life in ways you cannot predict. And many of those ways are negative. I meet with dozens of entrepreneurs a week. No matter how they couch it, they are asking for money. They come to me wanting to know first, will I invest myself? Doubtful, unless I already know them really well, know the company really well, and have some spare cash.
Occam's Razor
DECEMBER 6, 2010
In a world where we are overwhelmed with data and metrics and key performance indicators and reports and dashboards and. sometimes all it takes to make some sense of all this "mess" is someone stepping up to share a tiny slice of wisdom from their experience. That's my plan for this blog post. To share with you three custom reports that I find to be super valuable when I am doing web data analysis.
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 27, 2010
As one of the leaders in the group-buying space, LivingSocial has had a great year, ending the year with $175 million in investment from Amazon earlier this month. But like many success stories, LivingSocial didn't suddenly spring up wholly formed. Indeed, the company has had to pivot several times before landing on their current form - and success.
Lightspeed Venture Partners
DECEMBER 8, 2010
'Some observations from Bipul Sinha about the internet and media industry in 2011. 1. Year of Social Utilities. With over half a billion users and open graph integration, Facebook is the Internet with social graph at its core. This is as much of a game-changer (due to a new distribution model based on the social graph) as going from offline to the Internet was in the 90s.
Life Beyond Code
DECEMBER 21, 2010
I am very inspired by the work of my friend Dr. Mani Sivasubramaniam. Dr. Mani is a heart surgeon. Dr. Mani is also an Internet Marketer. While I have not seen any other heart surgeon who is an Internet Marketer, Dr. Mani is more special than that. He sets aside part of the profits from his Internet Marketing initiatives to help young children with congenital heart diseases.
crowdSPRING Blog
DECEMBER 29, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 5, 2010
Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.
Occam's Razor
DECEMBER 20, 2010
The last blog post shared custom analytics reports that you can use to find amazing insights faster, enabling you to create a focused, truly data driven organization. In this blog post I want to continue the let's help make your day-to-day life better path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights.
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 9, 2010
During this week's roundtable we had a group of entrepreneurs from the Pune Open Coffee Club gather at the offices of Persistent Systems to participate in the roundtable together. It is a very good format for entrepreneur groups around the world to get together and network around the roundtable programming which happens every week, religiously. First up today was Jacqueline Floro-Pierre with ShopTranslated from China.
Growthink Blog
DECEMBER 20, 2010
If you aren't familiar with who Jason Fried is, you should be. Jason is the Founder of 37 Signals, makers of Basecamp, with over 3 million users and 2.8 million live projects, arguably the world's most popular project management software. Jason is also the author of Rework, a New York Times bestseller on entrepreneurship, technology, and design. Basecamp is the project management and collaboration tool of choice for the serious entrepreneur.
Start Up Blog
DECEMBER 16, 2010
It’s interesting how technology changes the way we interact. In fact, the way we do a year in review is also changing as Google show here with their Zeitgeist 2010 video. I’m sure there is something in this for everyone, not just retrospectively, but the type of stuff that matter in our business prospectively.
crowdSPRING Blog
DECEMBER 3, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 28, 2010
If your startup is great enough to get a term sheet from angel investors or a venture capitalist, the next step for the investor is to complete the dreaded due diligence process. This is the last step of the process, where surprises in the evaluation of the management team, documentation, and personnel problems can derail the investment. Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
DECEMBER 7, 2010
I am unemployable. I always have been. I always will be. Up until last year employment gave me a morbid fear deep in the pit of my stomach. Even with a successful personal business, living in a house that is paid for, and a dedicated support team in the wings – I still was freaking out about the fact that I don’t think I could hold a job anywhere for anyone.
Ben's Blog
DECEMBER 13, 2010
Snap yo fingers, do yo step. You can do it all by yo self. —Lil Jon, Snap Yo Fingers. Gaurav Dhillon was one of the great enterprise entrepreneurs of the ‘90s and early 2000s. He founded and ran the premier integration company of the era, Informatica, took it public and built it into the number one company in the market. Informatica is currently worth over $4B.
Austin Startup
DECEMBER 7, 2010
SpeedMenu announced today that their mobile menuing, ordering and payment software has entered the beta testing stage with Micros Systems Point of Sale (POS) software. SpeedMenu enables patrons at participating establishments to connect to their tab, order items and pay for their tab – all from their cell phone. Dan Janjigian, CEO of SpeedMenu said “Due to the size of the Micros installed client base, SpeedMenu will begin offering service in every city around the country.
Babbling VC
DECEMBER 5, 2010
"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Niels Bohr (1885-1962). According to the above quote from Nils Bohr, it's taken me at least ten years to exhaust many of the opportunities for making mistakes. This doesn't mean I won't make any more mistakes nor does it infer that I am now going to rock as a VC.
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